Why do people believe in the spooky and supernatural? The psychologist author delves here into the murky histories of spiritualism, telepathy, telekinesis, mind control and prophecy. They can all be explained, he suggests, by "the power of suggestibility", confirmation bias, "ideomotor movements" (small muscular movements caused by thinking about something), "hypersensitive agency detection", dysfunctional sleep, and other phenomena that induce what he calls "things that go bump in the mind".

Wry anecdotes abound: the sisters who founded the spiritualist movement "gradually formed a somewhat different kind of bond with the spirit world and by the late 1880s both were drinking heavily". The irrepressible light-edutainment style can skate briskly over complex issues: Wiseman's rather quick endorsement of one psychologist's view that "free will" is merely an "illusion" seems to bear a complicated relationship with his advice elsewhere on how not to be sucked into a cult. Still, it's an amusing compendium of interesting things and skills (how to do a "cold reading"; or, arguably more useful, how to hypnotise a chicken). I don't know why Wiseman insists the Rorschach image at the start is meaningless, though. It is obviously, as I triumphantly scrawled, a "SHEEP".

Magician and fraud-debunker James Randi, a hero in Wiseman's book, pops up again in this, whose scientist lead authors claim to be doing "neuromagic": investigating how the foolery of professional magicians works on the brain. The book is a jolly travelogue, taking in conferences, Vegas theatres and the world championship of magic in Beijing, and talking about the psychology of attention and other quirks (hello again, "ideomotor effect" and confirmation bias!) exploited by conjurors.

There is sometimes more hand-waving (eg about oxytocin or mirror neurons) than rigorous scientific explanation, as in one way befits a book about hand-wavers, but the argument that perceptual illusions are "adaptive shortcuts" rather than mere flaws is persuasive, and the authors' ideas for future experiments sound interesting. It's an admirable form of demystification: they explain how a lot of magic tricks work, but preserve a sense of wonder by emphasising how amazing it is that they do work. That's a good trick. Plus, I now know how to steal your watch as well as hypnotise a chicken. This job is so educational.

Television Mockumentary, by Craig Hight (Manchester, £16.99)

A lot of people were fooled, so legend has it, by Orson Welles's famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, since which the mock-documentary – or, if you will, "mockumentary" – form has gone from strength to strength. In this illuminating and expansive survey, Hight discusses mockumentary in film (This Is Spinal Tap, Borat, The Blair Witch Project); mockumentary tropes in "comedy vérité" (Arrested Development, Marion and Geoff, The Office); and even the relationship between mockumentary and videogames or The Onion website. He observes acutely "the naturalisation of mockumentary discourse", within both comedy (The Daily Show) and "serious" productions.

It was a particular pleasure to be reminded of Chris Morris in "Paedogeddon": "We believe [this] story is too upsetting to transmit. We only do so tonight with that proviso." Given the book's subject matter, its interludes devoted to reviewing or attacking the work of other media theorists must be a deliberate satire on the narcissism of small differences among scholars. I propose that henceforth we call this subversive style "mockademic".